465: No Such Thing As An Itching Powder Guild

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tashinski, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the man who invented the underwater ejector seat once broke his tailbone in six places while testing the system on the ground rather than in the water.

What an idiot.

This was a bike called John Rawlins.

He was very eminent.

Well, I didn't know about him.

I was at a comedy gig a few weeks ago, and the comedian started talking to the guy next to me in the audience, and this guy started talking about how he was either reading about or related to the man who invented the underwater rejector seat.

And the comedian just loved it, just made hay with it.

Did he speak a whale over time?

Had he been speaking to you previously?

He said, anything's better than that guy.

Yeah, yeah, they spoke for English, actually.

That's so amazing.

Yeah.

What a heckle.

He just mentioned Sir John Rawlins.

I thought, underwater rejector seat, I've never heard of that.

No, I don't think of that as something that has been invented, in fact.

Right.

And so John Rawlinson.

You would be gutted, actually, Anna, if you invented the underwater ejector seat, which you would reasonably assume hasn't been invented yet.

Yeah.

You need to find out about this.

I've drawn up a lot of patents.

I was about to apply.

This is devastating.

But it is for planes.

But it's for underwater planes.

Well,

it's for planes that have crashed and gone underwater.

Yeah, underwater planes.

Sorry.

Yes.

So basically, it works a lot.

If a pilot is unconscious and the plane is sinking, it'll pop out the pilot without the pilot needing to do anything.

So that's very clever.

Why didn't it pop him out prior to hitting the water and sinking?

Like I would argue, an ejector seat is built to do.

I suppose the plane is thinking, maybe he's

alright.

The plane is thinking, maybe he's still,

he or she will pull this round, and then the plane goes into the water and the plane realises, I better step in.

Okay.

I think it's usually the pilot that presses the ejector seat button or pulls the lever.

I'm not sure the sentient plane has been invented yet to get it.

In this case, it's automatic, right?

Yes, once it hits water.

But I think what happens is often if you're trying to land your plane, you want to land it rather than eject because then you can save the plane.

You can land planes on water, as we've seen, solely landed there

on the Hudson.

Maybe you try and do it, but then you don't get it quite right and you start sinking.

Okay.

Also, it's dangerous to eject when you're too close to the ground anyway.

Like if you look at the survival rates of ejection under a certain altitude, it's a lot lower.

So, you know, if you're too close to the water, if you're just coming into land, you get into trouble.

But they are, they're amazing because, okay, let's say you were parachuting out of a regular plane and it was too low altitude.

The parachute wouldn't be able to get the grip and so you would plummet and die.

But ejector seats are actually designed so that you can eject from a plane while it's on the ground and survive.

Yes, the rates are low.

Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

It can propel you up high enough.

It propels you up high enough, and the parachute works.

And that's what they're designed to do.

Like, not all of them do that, I think.

No, but you can do that.

Yeah, you can do it.

Which is amazing.

And you actually, and this was available in the 80s i'm sure we'll get on to rollins in a minute and but this was in the 80s there was a soviet pilot and he was flying down and his um plane had rolled and so the cockpit was now facing towards the ground and he was only a few feet from the ground whoa like he was like I don't know how many, but it's like, let's say, definitely less than 50 feet away from the ground.

But he's facing downwards, right?

He didn't.

Pressed the ejector seat, fired him towards the ground.

Everyone thought he's a goner, obviously.

Yeah.

Like almost in a cartoon way.

Did they go and look at the 20-feet deep hole that drilled into the ground?

We just can't guess.

Yeah, go on.

Marshmallow Factory.

There's always a marshmallow factory.

Yeah, or a mattress factory.

Just a bit further.

Just got to get directly over the old pillow mountain.

Oh no, it's the broken glass factory.

No, they had like an autogyroscope system in the seat.

So as it pushed you out, it knew which way was up and then it could fire rocket boosters which took him in the right direction away from the ground.

And the amazing thing was that no one knew about this.

It was Soviet technology and the Americans didn't know about it and Europeans didn't know about it.

And it was live on television or it was shown on television.

So everyone thought he was dead.

And then suddenly when he survived, everyone was like, holy shit, how did that happen?

Yeah, that's amazing.

So they thought he was dead when he ejected, but then they saw him s spin around and go back up in the air.

I think they they thought he was dead.

Everyone's eyes kind of followed the wreckage and then they turned back and he was ta-da.

Yeah.

What a trick.

So cool.

That's amazing.

Quickly back on the original character in this John Rawlins.

So Sir John Rawlins.

Amazing character.

Sir John Stuart Peps Rawlins.

Pepys Rawlins, because he was a descendant of Pepys.

Was he?

Yeah.

Pretty cool.

Direct descendant, apparently.

I couldn't find the family tree, but his father was also hugely decorated as a military person.

He comes from huge stock and he designed the first protective helmets using composite materials.

He advised the British Standards Institute on how to make motorcycle helmets, cycling helmets, horse riding helmets, racing helmets.

So a lot of the helmets we wear today vary very slightly thanks to some of his research.

That's so cool, isn't it?

This is interesting about Rawlins because I have often wondered before why are all these helmets different?

You know, horse riding and cycling.

It's going to be very similar if you fall off headfirst and bet the same helmet will do it.

But do you think John just wanted to make us an extra buck by

diversifying wearing a bike helmet on a horse?

Well, one of my sex helmets.

It looks a lot like a horse helmet, doesn't it?

You know that orange one that I wear.

It does, it does.

I don't look stupid, Andy, do I?

No.

No.

No, no.

I was trying to read more about the underwater ejector.

Oh, sorry.

Are we saying ejection seat?

I think this is like a

detectorists thing.

Yes, right.

Where we'll get lots of letters saying it's an ejection seat.

I've seen lots of people saying ejection.

I saw a few things online saying ejection.

Yeah.

I'm going to keep saying it.

And if you want to contact James individually for saying ejector, we'll just duke it out.

I'm going after James Bond.

Yeah.

He would call it an ejector seat, wouldn't he?

He absolutely would.

But that's Bond for you.

Such an average.

No one does that.

Such an average.

But I was reading about someone who ejected in 1954, which was just before Rawlins invented the underwater ejection seat.

And it was off an aircraft carrier, a British aircraft carrier, right?

And their plane was a thing called the Westland Wyvern, right?

You know, Wyvern is a mythical dragon-y creature.

Get this?

It had folding wings.

There are these pictures of all the planes on the aircraft carrier, and their wings, just halfway across, just fold up like elbows.

Okay,

like a table tennis table.

Exactly.

What's to do with that?

Like to fly through

some mountain, close mountains.

That's exactly what it's all.

Right.

So that's it.

Yeah, yeah.

Everyone, breathe in.

We're going through two mountains.

It's to stash them on the decks of aircraft carriers.

You can store five planes where you could only store two if they had their wings out.

But honestly, I've never seen it before.

The wings literally halfway along.

They just fold up.

Like a butterfly.

Amazing.

Or a finger.

In fact, they had two joints.

They had two joints in them, so it is exactly like a finger.

Just if you crook your finger in that creepy way,

all right, well, the shoes on it.

Why didn't they do it like a butterfly?

That would take up much less space.

Yeah, you could have folded it right up.

Do it at the shoulder.

Yeah.

Not the elbow, you idiots.

So I thought that the only underwater ejection seats were ejection seats that were used underwater, having not been intended for it, because that does seem to happen.

And I was reading a blog of a guy called Russ Pearson.

Did you read about him?

This was 1969, and he ejected in the Pacific off the coast of California from an ejector seat underwater.

So he'd crash-landed.

I mean, it sounds like he definitely said, I thought I was definitely going to die, because obviously I was 20 feet underwater.

I was sinking incredibly fast.

Wow.

I just pressed a button and hoped for the best.

It broke his back at the time, but I think he was too panicked to notice while he was underwater.

And somehow, I think there was a boat suddenly which turned a light on in the distance, which told him where the surface was.

So he managed to swim up to the surface.

But he said the worst thing about ejecting underwater in an ejector seat is what do you have to have on you that automatically is applied when you eject from a plane in the air?

Oxygen.

Actually, oxygen is one thing.

Lip balm.

Like, what are you doing?

What's applied to you?

I haven't phrased this very well, and I can understand the errors, but I'm talking about a parachute.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So it ejects you with a parachute.

He made it up to the surface, but then the parachute just pulled him down and down again.

Oh, no.

So he's just up there with a broken back parachute pulling him down.

And then he said he felt something on his feet and he thought that's a shark.

And so he tried to find his shark repellent, which for some reason he was carrying in his pocket.

Batman from the 1960s.

But he realised it was just the plane.

And then, yeah, he just about survived.

He might have to be evacuated on a medical plane.

Pretty cool.

I have a cool thing.

So the first person to use an ejector seat, I think in the UK,

was a guy.

He was an Irish mechanic.

He was called Bernard Lynch.

And he did it in 1945.

And later he did 32 more ejections from planes to test the stuff.

Yes, he was the guinea pig.

He was the guinea pig.

The ejection seat guinea pig.

Yeah, for the firm Martin Baker, which is the British firm which makes thousands of ejection seats and does all that.

Anyway, I got to speak to Bernard Lynch's son, Dermot.

I rang him up and we had a cool cheek.

Yeah.

And

he had some crazy adventures.

So once he landed in a field, right, when he was testing an ejector seat, and then he just sort of left his parachute behind.

I think he tied it to a tree or something.

And he just went to the pub.

Like a dog poo.

Huge, huge problem.

I'm coming back to pick it up, okay?

Go and get stressed out.

He just went to the pub.

And the the team turn up, obviously, because they they track Broadly where you're going and they're looking for it.

And so the team from the company arrived at the field, thought, Oh no, Bernard's he's died somehow.

He's evaporating.

The tree ate him.

And they phoned his wife, they told him he was dead, and then they found him sitting in the pub.

Straight away.

I'm not sure before they found the body or anything, they were just like, Oh, we're pretty sharp.

He tied up his parachutes and then he died.

Actually, I forgot to say, when you were ten minutes late today, James, I did call Polino and that.

So

you'll want to reassure her.

That's such a good point.

Yeah, two hours later, they found him in the parachute.

Wow.

He wasn't a legend.

He subjected his body to so much volunteering to do this.

Because he used to, before he had himself fired out of actual planes,

they erected what sounds to me like one of those things at a fairground where you're sitting on a big long bench and it lifts all the way up a pole and then it drops you really hard.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, those fairgrounds.

I think he was like on a reverse version of that.

So he was on the side.

He was on the pole.

He was reverse polling.

No, he was on something that would look the same, but it shoots you up incredibly fast.

So it was like a bench attached to a pole.

It was more like, if we were talking fairground things, it was more like the strongman kind of where you slam the hammer out and you send the weight.

He's sitting all the time.

He's sitting on the weight.

That's brilliant.

And yeah, he's been on the bottom.

He was only six inches tall, wasn't he?

Actually,

this worked.

But he used to just do that until it got too painful.

So they'd do it more and more with more and more force because you need maximum force for an ejection seat to get people out of harm's way.

And as soon as it got to such an agonising level that he was like, I don't think we can do this to pilots, he'd say, that's max force.

Next up.

He was very tough.

Yeah.

He

did one thing, he refused to eject over water.

He just wouldn't do it.

He just wouldn't do it.

In none of the experiments was he willing to do it.

Oh, okay.

pubs.

Why?

No pubs.

It was because he'd fallen in sheep dip when he was eight.

And it was a really traumatising experience.

He might have nearly drowned or something.

He'd fallen in

a pool of sheep dip.

What's that?

It's a chemical solution that you make sheep walk through to, I think,

keep them clean or antiseptic.

It's quite different than an ocean.

Yeah, so it's quite strange that you would project one onto the other.

Yeah, I guess it must have just been a drowning.

Sounds more like that thing you go through when you're going to a swimming pool.

Yeah, that sort of thing.

It is like like that.

Ah, yeah, yeah, that's it.

Okay, but trauma.

It was enough to traumatise Bernard, yeah.

I think that's probably a fair enough request

if you're constantly being lobbed out of an ejector seat.

Martin Baker did he work for this guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they

have a website, and on their website, it has a counter that tells you how many lives they've saved.

Oh, really?

Yeah, isn't that cool?

Last time that I checked, which was when I did this research yesterday, it was 7,690

lives that they've saved.

Decent.

I wonder how soon after the ejection seat saving the life, they do the counter.

It'd be cool if they did it in real time.

In real time, yeah.

As in, they have some kind of thing in the chairs that whenever.

It actually, when you pull the lever and you rock it out of the thing, the chair automatically spits out a little form, and you have to write it.

I have had my life saved by this.

Do you think it ever then goes down again?

Because sometimes, you know, you'll think you've saved the life and then they'll crash into a thornbush or something.

Or we think it's like when a goal is disallowed, you know, the goal score goes up, but they are actually, you know, VAR says death.

What if that guy was run over by a car on the way to the pub?

Would that probably?

Discount.

I don't know.

But they were called James Martin and Valentine Baker, weren't they?

Yeah.

He was an amazing pilot, Valentine Baker.

He was Amy Johnson's flight instructor.

Sorry, wait, is Amy Johnson?

He was an aviator from the 30s.

A sort of classic aviator from the God, the Amelia Earhart sort of period.

Was she the first to fly across the Atlantic or something?

God, I can't remember.

I can't remember.

She was the first to do something.

Fly to Australia?

Fly to Australia.

I think she crash-landed on her way though.

I've seen footage of that.

So Amy Johnson, I think I've been to the town on the coast in Kent where she disappeared.

Did she disappear?

Yeah, yeah.

I think she was flying.

Oh, God, where is it?

It's near...

There was a Turkish restaurant we went to, and I had an apple.

Oh, yeah, okay, I know.

That's a Turkish restaurant.

I didn't remember it because I ordered the turnip juice as my drink for the meal.

I've heard this through.

And the waiter said,

the waiter said,

are you sure you want the turnip juice?

And I said,

I'm here.

I'm on the North Kent coast.

I want to experience...

Turkish culture as it was intended to.

And it was absolutely terrible.

He didn't like it, guys.

Spoiler, didn't I?

Okay, guys, so if you want to know where this happened, either Google where Amy Johnson crashed or just check out Andy's history on TripAdvisor reviews and you'll see it in there.

Thank God you won't ask to do the eulogy at her funeral.

She was a wonderful person.

Can I quickly just mention yesterday

Herne Bay?

Herne Bay?

Herne Bay, yeah, yeah.

Very nice.

My wife once

won a load of teddies on a shooting gallery in Herne Bay.

Really?

Yeah.

So many good personal aren't it in Hernbay.

It's a rich place.

I went there not long ago, but I yeah, but I was only making a connecting train, so I just stayed in the station.

That's a better starry than both my eyes.

I read an article about the ejection club at Motabaker Run, and they called it the only club where you have to be thrown out to get in.

Brilliant.

That's right.

That's really good.

I've got an alternative to an ejection seat here.

This is great.

This is a plane.

It's an American plane called the Douglas F3D Sky Knight.

All right.

Do you have to say it like that?

Yes, you do.

It was this US plane.

And if you had to bail out, it's a really small cruise, that's two-seater plane.

Yeah.

You're sitting next to each other.

One is the pilot and one is...

Co-pilot?

No,

genuinely doing something else like radar or

getting some drinks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's got a tiny trolley, and he offers the pilot chicken or fish about halfway through the flight.

Do you want to buy any lottery cards?

We're selling lottery cards.

It's for charity.

If you've got any spare change in the country you've come from, you can buy these lottery cards.

They're both flying over Cambodia now.

What are you doing?

Yeah, but it's exactly that, you know.

So anyway, there's this plate, the Sky Knight.

And if they had to bail out, the crew didn't have an injector seat in the plane.

What they had effectively was a slide.

Oh, really?

Going down and back.

Yeah, yeah.

So you would just have to pop out between the entrance of the plane.

It's, I mean, this sounds incredibly risky.

You did, obviously, you'd have a parachute on when you did that, ideally.

Yeah, otherwise

what's the next moment?

It sounds risky.

Are you sure you want to do this?

This looks pretty risky.

No, you're right.

Let's die instead.

Let's just crash.

I'll have to trick it.

But sometimes they use this plane to deploy commandos into the jungle.

So you'd have one pilot and one commando in the plane.

And at a certain point, the commando just pops down the slide.

That sounds so cool.

It sounds amazing.

Yeah.

Did it work?

I think it was incredibly dangerous.

It wasn't used for long.

And I think because it was first used in the A3D, which came to stand for all three dead, because that was three people

who would be in the plane.

And I think it took a long time because it was behind the seats.

So you realise you were going to crash, and then you had to sort of clamber over.

You're wearing quite a lot of seats.

It's really cramped.

Squeeze it one after the other.

Yeah, yeah.

Even now, they say if you lose your phone behind the seats, you're not allowed to get it yourself.

You have to get the attendant to come and get your phone.

And that's in case you fall down the chute when you're trying.

It's just the last thing.

If you love ejector seats and they look so cool,

I spent a lot of hours last night trying to find the most affordable one, but on eBay,

they go.

They look so cool.

They sell them to just

for dinner.

Let me tell you an anecdote about a turkey seat.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that there is a school in Massachusetts that has had all of its 7,000 light bulbs permanently on for over a year and a half now because no one knows how to turn them off.

So this is a lighting system that was installed in Minichalg Regional High School, which is in Massachusetts.

And the idea was they were thinking, how can we have a lighting system that's going to save us a lot of money?

And they came up with this.

They thought this is going to save us.

hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.

Unfortunately...

It was just, it happened to be very efficiently built.

Yeah, there were LED light bulbs.

It had dimming qualities on it.

It was a great system that was energy efficient in a way that usual light bulbs wouldn't be.

And so they decided to go for the system.

And then during the pandemic, something in the system went faulty and failed, which meant that the lights weren't dimming.

It meant they weren't going off altogether.

It meant basically that close to 7,000 of these light bulbs were just remaining on.

Then it was discovered that actually the hardware that was needed to fix it wasn't available and they needed to order it from China, which had a backlog of orders, so they couldn't get it over.

So, as we speak, it still hasn't been fixed.

They know the problem, they've ordered the parts, they're arriving.

I think they have them now, but they're not putting them in till March.

And so, because they need like experts to come and put them in, and they can't get them, it is so mad.

And because it's like a taxpayer-funded school, obviously, so every day you have a reminder of what your taxes are going towards as you walk past this brightly illuminated school, and it's costing thousands a month.

Maybe they turn the electricity off, like as in every night when everyone, all the kids go away.

away, you just...

Yeah, you'd think so, right?

Maybe, maybe there's health and safety reasons why you can't do that.

It feels like there must be something they can use that light for.

Do you know what I mean?

I mean, there must be a use at night to put solar panels in that.

Exactly, yeah.

That's how I actually

all my electricity in my house is I put solar panels underneath all my lights and then keep my lights on all the time.

Yeah, so it's a big problem.

It's costing them possibly tens of thousands of dollars at this point.

I mean, it certainly has.

And some of the teachers try to fix it by just taking the light bulbs out themselves.

Yeah, just that one round.

It does, but you know, they only take out three or four as opposed to the best.

But you can't do that every night, can you?

7,000 bulbs.

You've got a project.

You prefer those ceiling lights, you know, the recessed ceiling lights, they're a complete pain in the ass to get it.

Screw.

Yeah, exactly.

That's my two penny worth.

Speaking of bad lighting systems,

actually, I had a little look in the in the fish inbox podcast at qi.com just about you know see if anyone had written in about light bulbs.

Thank you Paddy McRae who wrote in quite a while ago now.

I hope you're still listening Paddy.

This is an incredible fact.

It's about the Terminal 5 at Heathrow, right?

Oh yeah.

Which has this beautiful high ceiling.

You know, like the bulbs are all about 120 feet in the air.

And between 2008 and 2013, no bulbs were changed in the ceiling because they didn't have a good way of doing it.

And at that point, about 60% of the bulbs had gone.

Oh, wow.

And so the reports

say that they hired a team of tightrope walkers because that was the only way to get it.

No, that's so funny.

That can't be true.

That's untrue.

I'm pretty.

Look, take it up with the Daily Telegraph, who reported that a Cirque du Soleil-style high-level rope work firm had been engaged to change the bulbs.

That's so funny.

But they would do some of them, and then some of them would be changed by someone in a human cannonball, and they would be fired up.

And then other ones, it would be trapeze guys.

Pyramid of clowns.

Just all the new one.

Very, very risky there.

Yeah, that's so funny.

I'm sure no one was in a costume at any time.

I was in Dubai recently, and there's lots of glass skyscrapers there.

And they're all, the window cleaners are all done by hand.

So they have people who are literally like on ropes going down all of the highest buildings in the world.

Yeah.

Just cleaning them.

That's a fun job.

I've always thought that would be a fun job, actually.

One of those harnesses.

They call them rats because they're rope access technicians.

That's That's the nickname.

The main company that does Burj Khalifa, which is the highest building,

if you want to get a job there, they show you like a video nasty before you are allowed to apply.

And they show you like really awful examples of people who almost fell and stuff.

And they're like, if you're okay with the video, then you can have an interview.

Right.

Do they show you Mission Impossible 4?

In which Tom Cruise climbs up the Burj Khalifa.

Oh, he's a sandstorm, isn't it?

Yeah, he's got some special sticky gloves and they stop working.

And then he looks behind them and there's a sandstorm approaching.

And then, oh, better climb a bit faster.

Well, but isn't he responsible for making one of these guys have to do extra work?

Because while he was up there, he graffited Katie Holmes' name.

Like, I love Katie Holmes.

Yeah, yeah.

And they had to go and clean that off.

Yeah.

That's great.

When they first had electric lights, Edison's ones,

you would have them in a building.

Obviously, no one had seen them before.

And so there would be a sign often next to them warning people not to try and light the light bulb with a match.

Wow.

Wow, that's brilliant.

I've seen one of these signs.

It says, this room is equipped with Edison Electric Light.

Do not attempt to light with match.

Simply turn key on wall by door.

The use of electricity for lighting is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of sleep.

Does affect sound.

If you leave the lights on all night, you're going to have your sleep affected.

That's just a lie.

It was a lie.

They didn't know at the time.

They didn't know any better.

They didn't.

Lights on all night.

Insomnia.

I didn't know

why you had to have a light bulb.

Like why you couldn't just, why you needed the glass, basically.

Gone?

Well, it's because

it'll react with the oxygen, the filament.

To make a vacuum, right?

So if you have an incandescent bulb, this is the good old-fashioned, you know, pre-EU.

The one where you've got the bulb, the tiny bit of wire, and then you run a current through the wire, and that blows.

It's because the filament would react with oxygen immediately and then burn out really fast.

And if you, as James says, create a vacuum or fill it with an inert gas, then it lasts longer.

But I just, I didn't know actually why I had this moment yesterday where it's kind of an anti-light bulb moment where I was thinking, wait, hang on, why don't we just not have the bulbs?

Save on glass.

Save so much glass.

And

yeah.

What would the safety be outside of that in terms of if you went and touched it rather than burning a half spoon bulb?

So you wouldn't electrocute yourself or...

Yeah, and there's an electric current flowing through it.

I mean, small current, I think.

But you would burn yourself.

It's so hot.

The heat is so cool.

The level of heat that you have in your own room, again, if you're using an incandescent bulb, which you shouldn't be, because obviously they're not as efficient.

But

that filament gets to 2,200 degrees centigrade.

Isn't it so weird to think you're sitting in your sitting room just biding your time and there's something over there which is that hot?

And also the filament is so long when you look inside an old bulb.

It's two meters long.

It's just really, really thin, 0.2 millimeters thick.

This is an old tungsten filament.

In Babylon, ancient Babylon,

if you wanted to buy enough oil to light your front room

with an oil lamp, you would have to work for 41 hours

to get it to burn for an hour.

Oh, I see.

Okay, so 41 hours work, you'd be able to buy enough oil to make your light bulb for one hour.

Okay.

That is rubbish.

In 1992, in America, you could get the same amount of light by working for less than one second.

Wow.

Imagine being a dad in ancient Babylon, you know, getting your family to go around, turning off the lights.

That has taken 40 hours of work.

I've worked all week

one hour.

I come back into the room.

No one's in the room.

So we've never mentioned actually the longest burning light bulb in the world, which is kind of incredible, the Livermore Centennial Light Bulb.

It's been burning non-stop brackets with a couple of caveats, closed brackets, since 1901.

And

I think one of the keys to a success is that it's four watts.

But it has to be on 24 hours a day because it's in a fire station, so it's to provide a bit of illumination for fire engines.

And Guinness says there's been one break in its operation when it was taken from one station to another in the 70s.

And on that occasion, it had, apparently, it says on its own website, a full police and fire truck escort to take it it to its site.

It's just the firetruck taking it to another place.

You can't call that an escort if you bring in your own thing.

Escort implied to me there was like another firetruck running alongside it, kind of stopping anyone else from getting near, like a bodyguard.

I'm more, for the longest light bulb in the world, I'm more interested in the fourth longest lasting light bulb in the world.

Because it was, so this is a light bulb that is in New York City.

It's not there anymore.

But at the time, it was outside a place called the Gasnik Supply, which was a hardware store.

And And the owner, Jack Gasnick, he was the guy who was trying to get it acknowledged to be older than all of the other light bulbs.

But to the point of like, he was furious.

He was like, there's no way that the Livermore light bulb is an actual genuine light bulb.

He wrote to dear Abby, which was like one of those agony aunt things saying, what do I do?

I've got a light bulb that's lasted longer.

That must have been a nice day for Abby.

Normally writing about people having affairs and stuff.

She's like, oh, finally, a light bulb.

Yeah.

And he wrote to Guinness saying, this is insane that you've given this record.

It's clearly a fake light bulb.

My light bulb.

He's like a cardboard cutter.

He thinks something was going on.

So he said that the bulb is not dark enough to have burnt consistently.

So he said, right away, I saw it was so clear.

It does not show any sign of carbonization.

A bulb that has burned 20, 30, 40 years would be extremely dark from the carbon.

Two, the bulb is a brass turnknob socket.

You can't have a bulb burn continuously in a brass turnknob socket.

I strongly disagree.

It would get so hot, it would burn the wires.

Yeah, so there was a big challenge and no one accepted it.

When you said this one isn't there anymore in New York, has it gone off or is it, do you know what's happened to it?

The whole of that block,

the half block, was sort of taken down to the ground.

So as far as we know, it's a very good thing.

By this guy in a rage.

No.

By Livermore and its mafia.

There was a huge fire.

You know when you like try and build a new house and they say, oh, sorry there's some really like there's some lizards here

going extinct or something it does feel like you shouldn't be able to knock down a house that has the fourth oldest light bulb in it.

Yeah absolutely absolutely.

Conservation.

There is an older one in the UK an older light bulb.

Then the Live Livemore one year.

Is there?

Yeah, but it just hasn't been on all the time.

Some tragic person's just kept to use light bulbs.

Pretty much, yeah.

It's called the Ediswan Light Bulb.

It was first turned on in 1883 in Haytam in England.

And it's owned by someone called Beth Crook, or at least it was when I read this article.

But yeah, they don't really turn it on very often.

I think that's sensible.

I think you have a nice sensible special occasions.

Well, some people think that the Livermore one has lasted so long because it's never turned off.

Yeah.

Because when you turn something off, sometimes there's like a surge of electricity and stuff that can damage the filament.

Whereas this has always had four watts just.

I do that with my computer.

Yeah.

If I turn it off, I think horrible things will happen.

So I just keep flogging it on.

I do the same with my car, Edgen.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact is that in 1955, one person secretly bought almost all the onions in America.

This is a guy called Vince Kosuga, and he was an onion farmer in the 1930s.

And he thought I want to take this bigger and so he decided to corner the entire onion market of America by buying all of the onions

and so then you know you've corner the market you've got all the onions so you can absolutely control the price of onions yeah but the the thing I find so incredible about this is that in order to stop word spreading because as soon as word spreads that he's doing this then people selling him onions are going to go sort of I'm going to charge way more for these onions then to stop word spreading he would have had to do it completely in secret and make sure none of the onion sellers are talking to each other going, did that guy Vince come to you last night?

I'd just go in with a different mustache and a hat.

I think so.

So what he especially bought, he bought onions, yes, but he also bought onions before they existed.

Potential onions.

Yeah, potential onions.

He bought onion futures.

Conceptual onions.

Conceptual onions.

The basic idea is you buy the right to buy the future onions for an agreed price.

You say, I'll buy 10 tons of onions from you next year for a pound a kilo or whatever.

And then you have to do that.

Yeah, you're betting that the price will go up in that time and you've already made the agreement.

So you'll make the difference.

And you could also be screwed, though.

You'd have to still stick to that price, even if they were worth less at the time.

But if you bought all the onions...

You can charge whatever price you want.

But then.

The weird trick he did was, as well as cornering the onion market, he didn't stop there.

So he bought all the onions.

And then he said to people who wanted to distribute onions, you're going to have to buy them off me for a huge price because I'm the only one with them.

So they did that.

He made shed loads of money there.

And then he thought, sort of, I'm gonna screw these guys over and flood the market anyway.

Yeah.

So then, stage two, he went to Chicago with all the onions left over in his warehouse, just lorry load after lorry load, dumped them, it sounds like, just on the streets in giant sacks.

So flooding the market with onions, plummeting the onion price down.

It's like onion Christmas.

Everyone just walks outside and there's just onions everywhere.

It's quite a shit Christmas, actually, I think, isn't it?

Stocking filled with onions.

Yeah, the reason he did that is because he was betting on onion futures.

So he knew he was going to do this.

So he bet that the price would go down.

So he made eight and a half million at the time, money at the time, for the first initial selling back to the farmer.

So he was kind of quids in anyway, right?

Yeah.

If you think about it, you've done this brilliant scheme of buying all the onions.

Yeah.

You've made a ton of money, but then you're left with all these onions, right?

You need to get rid of the onions somehow, but also make money out of them.

You could sell them at the normal price, or you could do this betting against the price going down thing.

The betting thing was very clever, yeah.

How amazing that he pulled it off, just by the way.

That this guy went around America and managed to successfully...

Collect every single, virtually every single onion.

I mean, he was brought into Congress because the farmers, once this scheme was discovered, and particularly this second bit that you were mentioning, Anna, about how he screwed them over, they said to their congressman, you can't have someone doing this.

We've always said this is going to be the problem with future trading and so on.

He's monopolized the market.

This can't happen.

So it wasn't illegal, though, but he was brought into Congress and his lawyer said, Make sure you just don't lie about anything.

And they said, We understand you own 97% of the onions in the United States.

And he said, That's incorrect, 98%.

Like, he had, he was missing 2% of onions in the States.

So, onions are really good.

They keep for a really long time.

If you keep them dark and dry, they keep for months and months and months on

going off.

But some of them did start to go off because he had lots and lots and lots of onions in Nilde's warehouses.

And then, supposedly,

Kasuga, he had the onions reconditioned to clean them up a bit, repackage them.

Take a few layers off, and it was like a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a peel off the whole thing out of it.

And then they were sent back into all the warehouses in Chicago where they'd been stored in the first place.

But that was assumed to be even more onions coming into the city.

People didn't realise those were the same onions as before.

People thought, oh my god, there are even more onions.

And the prices really collapsed then.

And this onion mess that happened in Chicago, it sounds absolutely bananas.

Orphans were receiving free onions in the streets.

The Chicago River was just taking load after load of onions that were being chucked into it.

Really?

Yeah.

The fish breaths.

Just years after.

They were like, Vince, why are you crying?

You've just made millions of dollars.

I'm a bit confused about why they were starting to be handed out to everyone.

The price was nothing.

But who's handing it out at this point?

Well, let's say you run an orphanage and you want to feed your orphans.

You're going to feed them with the thing that costs 10p for a million.

Got it.

Okay.

All that is free in a sack.

Yeah.

Just being dumped on your.

Not great fun for the orphans, actually, because once you've had 17 meals of just onion, then it gets old.

It's very versatile.

Yeah.

I think onion is one of those.

Oh, onion's one of those base foods.

Who was it who said this about British cuisine?

I think it was Athena, actually, Athena Kublenu, our friend.

And she said that basically every English dish begins with an English person cutting up an onion, putting it in a pan with some oil, and then we just decide what to do after that.

Yeah, that's very true.

Yeah.

You can't leave it on its own, though, can you?

It is very much a base.

You know, you've got to

put something else in.

Yeah, onion soup.

That's, yeah, yeah, they're the closest.

Onion soup is probably the closest to a natural onion.

Yeah, and really, that's 90% cheese.

So, um, in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the Onion Futures Act that meant that this could never happen again.

And it bans anyone from trading in onion futures, basically, in the United States.

But the Onion Futures Act also bans people from betting on the receipts of motion picture box office.

Oh, why?

So, according to the Onion Futures Act, you're not allowed to trade in onion futures or motion picture box office receipt futures.

Wow, hell.

So, onions and minions.

They're the

two areas.

Brilliant.

And that was because in 2010, the Motion Picture Association of America lobbied to stop people from being able to do these futures in motion pictures.

And rather than doing a new act, they just sort of lobbed it on the end of this und on top.

I always get confused.

I'm slightly confused about the aspect of motion picture box office receipts because it's the idea that I'll make is James Cameron doing this by basically saying like I'm gonna I'm gonna buy the rights to all future avatar movies and then he makes five avatar movies flooding the market.

That's pretty much what's happened.

He controls all the avatar movies so and then there are so many that they're being given away for free to orphans in the streets.

I'm slightly confused about the

I thought it might be like a producer's thing where you buy them up and then you make a deliberately shit film and then it doesn't get any Brox Office receipts and you bet against them.

But there were some tax schemes that did that in the UK.

There were tax schemes investing money in.

It's why there was a rash of particularly bad British comedy films.

Well it was actually the way that that worked is that you got tax relief if you invested in a British movie in the same way that if you gave money to charity you would.

Yeah.

And that's the avatar thing that we talked about with Wayne Rooney.

Oh yes, yeah.

And someone that James and I know from back in the day, Gareth Edwards, who made Rogue One, the Star Wars movie, but his first movie that he made was called Monster.

That's a great film.

It's a great film, and that was a tax scheme.

That was the company that needed to offset some money, and that's how he was funded to make that movie.

Well, that's the most entertaining tax scheme I've ever seen.

Yeah, it was a really brilliant movie.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely brilliant.

Nutmeg?

What?

The nutmeg monopoly?

Can we talk about that?

Right, sorry.

I was looking up other historical monopolies.

Yeah.

And the spiced nutmeg was controlled by the Dutch for classic decades.

Oh, a long time.

I think they even...

That's the thing they traded Manhattan for, the island of Manhattan.

They said, well, no, the British had it.

And then they said, no, we'll have that.

Sorry, they had it.

And then the British said, we quite like that island.

They said, well, we want this...

random spice island in the Pacific from you.

Banda Island, was that something?

Exactly.

Exactly.

The Banda Islands in Indonesia.

And the Dutch secured them.

Not actually a bad deal trading Manhattan for this spice island because the sheer amount of value they extracted by controlling, you know, really fiercely the nutmeg trade.

As in, you know, as with all colonial things, they treated the local people appallingly, killing people, importing their own farmers, all of this, like clearing the islands, planting their own trees.

And then they got the monopoly in nutmeg.

And for about 150 years, they controlled nutmeg and clothes pretty much worldwide.

They had almost all the nutmeg and clothes on the planet, right?

It's kind of 98% of it.

And if you stole a nutmeg,

they'd come after you, they'd kill you.

They ritually burned all their excess nutmeg every year in what must have been a lovely smelling yeah

so good christmas time come on yeah yeah yeah um and the markup was about 60 000

between source and street value wow nutmeg yeah that's a good markup a good amount and if you if you had a small sackful you were made for life right basically and this was just the bunch of dutch people who got this island basically yeah exactly this company great and this is before everyone knew it was bloody poisonous so you shouldn't owe dear

isn't it i i see i have a distant memory of them also, as a result, having a monopoly over a certain type of drug as a result of nutmeg being used.

I want to say MDMA.

They were basically the providers of MDMA as a result of this.

I think it I think, well, the monopoly was broken in the late 18th century.

So I go to the next slide.

Yeah, no, no, you read Jane Austen a certain way.

You can tell they are.

That was what caused the French Revolution, actually.

They were all off their tits.

Wow.

Okay, yeah.

And the man who broke the monopoly, or one of the men who broke the monopoly, is a Frenchman called Pierre Poivre, whose name, pleasingly, is Peter Pepper.

Peter Pepper, yeah.

Very nice.

Good on him.

And he supposedly nicked one of the trees out of the way that the Dutch hadn't spotted and made off with it.

And then seven years later, monopoly's broken, got nutmeg everywhere.

What a shame his name wasn't Pierre Nutmeg.

There is a theory that their Peter Piper picked a peck of pickle peppers is based on him.

Something like that.

I'm not sure it's true.

But you can see where the theory came from.

This fact is about sort of someone controlling a market, there not being any competition.

And it just reminded me of one of my favourite things.

And I think I learned this listening to a Wandrium course ages ago, actually.

But in medieval times, the guilds were really, really strong.

So if you're trading produce in a town, you have to be part of a guild.

This is in medieval England and France and lots of other European countries.

And if you weren't a member of the guild, you would not be allowed to sell your carrot or your

bracelets or whatever.

And

only two things I can think of.

But yeah, the guilds were so strict, so they didn't want any competition between any of their members.

You forget that, like, capitalism today, everyone's in competition all the time.

That was just anathema to them.

So they dictated everything you use to make your produce.

So if you're making your carrots, you have to make them with the tool that the guild says you have to make it with, using the exact techniques.

You're not allowed to work more than a a certain number of working hours.

They'll monitor you.

You, yeah, everything, machinery, everything.

And then you get to market and you've done it exactly the same as everyone else, and you absolutely can't advertise, which means you literally can't draw attention to yourself at all.

No.

And there were guilds that forbid things like sneezing or

nodding at passers-by because this was thought to be.

That must have been tough for the pepper guilds.

The poor man from the itching powder girl has to stand ramrod still.

That's amazing.

Wow.

I don't know how anyone saw anything, really.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1983, an autograph hunter wrote to Steve Jobs.

Jobs replied saying that he didn't sign autographs, but he signed that letter and it sold last year for half a million dollars.

That's incredible.

Did he put the stamp and put it through the post box and then go, oh,

damn it?

I think he was knowingly.

It's written very much as if a gag, I would say.

You never know, though.

He said, it's written, he says, I'm honoured you would write, but I'm afraid I don't sign autographs.

And it was sold at RR Auctions.

That's the letter R.

I know my accent is a bit weird, but RR Auctions.

A pirate auction sign, right?

And they suggested that perhaps it was a photograph or magazine enclosed in the original letter and that he didn't sign that as opposed to it being a joke.

But I agree, it does sound kind of like a joke, doesn't it?

It does.

I have an alternate theory about jobs.

So I was reading a book from 1910 called Chats on Autographs by A.M.

Broadley.

Just a little shout-out to him.

He'll be really great.

Yeah,

and he relates in this book the story of the Archbishop of York who wrote back to an autograph hunter saying, Sir, I never give my autograph and never will, and then signed it.

And maybe it was Steve Jobs doing a little tribute to that.

Yeah,

the Archbishop of York.

One of them, yeah, I don't know which one.

Wow.

Oh my god, and you're the first person ever to get that.

And he's finally can rest in peace.

Wow.

He was a huge fan of the Archbishops of Northern England, wasn't he?

Yeah, he was massive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've read a few times where people have tricked others into giving a signature in almost this Steve Jobs-esque kind of thing.

So, for example, Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, one of the ways that she used to make money after the assassination was that she used to sell her signature to people and got to a point where selling her signature got her quite a good living if she could do it.

But what people who would interview her would always trick her would be to get her to sign a release form to the interview that they'd filmed or whatever.

And then that's how they would get their signature.

So yeah, there's all these tricky ways, isn't there, of getting a celebrity signature if they don't give it.

Because a few don't.

We've mentioned Steve Martin.

He has a card that he hands.

Jonah Hill does the same thing.

Instead of signing, if you approach Jonah Hill, he just hands a card saying, I just met Jonah Hill.

It was a total letdown.

And that's just on his little business card.

There's a famous story of

Dennis Lilly, the Australian fast bowler cricketer, who met the Queen and asked for her autograph.

So she was in Melbourne watching some Test Tess cricket and then he sort of queued up and met her and said, Can I get your autograph, mate?

And there's actually a photo of him.

It's pronounced ma'am.

Well in fact that the first time he met her was earlier and I think he said g'day, how you going?

and then chucked out his hand for a handshake.

So he had form with the queen.

What's Prince Harry's child called?

Archery?

Or Lilibet?

Lilibet.

It's actually named after Dennis Lilly.

Yes.

Made such an impression.

Well he obviously did because he said, can I have your autograph?

Someone took a photo actually of him holding out a notebook and pen and her looking a bit like, probably not going to do that.

And she said, no, I'm sorry, it's against protocol.

But then, a few weeks later, he received in the post a photograph of that moment when he asked for her autograph signed by the Queen.

No way.

Yeah.

On people who refuse autographs,

friend of the podcast, George Elliott, she instructed her boyfriend, Henry Lewis, to write point-blank refusals to anyone who was.

Well, she would would have to get a massive crane, wouldn't she, with her huge hands

as novelty pencils, yeah.

Why?

Why did she refuse?

She's busy.

Middleman came.

She was very confused about what her name was, wasn't she?

Am I George?

Am I Marion Evans?

Have I got another pseudonym now?

Yeah.

Can I tell you someone who collected autographs?

Sure.

Yeah.

Queen Victoria.

Oh, yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

She had this cool thing.

I'd never heard of it before.

It was called an autograph fan.

And it's literally a fan.

And every separate blade of the fan, yeah, you write a different person's signature on.

Oh, they write it

even better,

they write it on.

She was a great forger, forgot.

But I just love the idea of Queen Victoria saying, Can I have your autograph to someone?

Yeah,

it was mostly her children and prime ministers and things like that.

That's pretty cool.

Do we have the fans?

Are they just wow?

Yeah, I'd love to see those.

Is that why they're called fans, people who ask for autographs?

Yeah, yeah.

It's a good, legit question, I think.

No, I knew it was not.

I know, but

why are they called fans?

Fanatical.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Or.

One of the most expensive autographs you can get is of button Gwinnett.

Button Guinet.

If you ever have an autograph of Button Gwinnett, it will cost at least $1 million.

At least.

Button Gwinnett.

Button Gwinnett.

Button, as in the things that you fasten your

clothes with.

And Gwinnett, exactly how you would expect to spell it.

Can we guess you're leaving us hanging, is that maybe we can guess who this forgotten is.

So it's obviously.

Oh no, it's not a forger, would it?

This is the most expensive signature.

It's not the most expensive, but it will cost you at least a million dollars to get it.

I think I know it.

Go on.

Is it Declaration of Independence?

It's Declaration of Independence.

And most people have...

Or a lot of people who collect autographs of people who signed the Declaration of Independence will have 55 of the 56.

But Button Gwynnett is extremely rare.

He died quite soon afterwards in a duel.

Someone called him a scoundrel and a lying rascal.

And he got in a duel and died.

And so there's like maybe a dozen or half a dozen of his signatures out there.

And if you want the full set, you're going to have to cough up at least a million dollars for him.

He's like the rarest football sticker.

Yeah.

Put it in six packs of cookies.

But it's amazing because he's like the least famous or one of the least famous ones, right?

Yeah.

But he's still.

Although I was, well, I was skimming the Declaration of Independence and you haven't heard of most of them.

Trust me.

Why were you?

I happened to be skimming because I was actually.

I just like to remind myself of the principles on which the country is based.

Everyone else on the bus is on their phone.

Anna's on her scroll.

I think if you're ever on point list, listener, and it comes up, name someone from the Declaration of Independence, button Gwynnett has got to be.

Oh, yes.

This is a good one.

I reckon most people couldn't get beyond the first six or seven.

But anyway, the reason I was skimming it was because I was wondering about

trying to get me on George Washington.

John Hancock.

Yeah, just name the first few presidents.

Ben Franklin, though?

Was he one as well?

Was Governor Morris who died with the whalebone up his penis?

Yeah, he was.

He was on the

poor guy.

John Adams.

That's why we've got that extra sentence, too, isn't there?

We brought it.

We just said Ben Franklin, John Adams.

Governor Morris, the guy who had the whalebone sword on his penis and died.

Poor guy.

The English getting this Declaration of Independence and meaning they're going.

It's the guy.

It's actually part of the signature.

They've just added it on afterwards.

For anyone doubting who this is.

John Hancock.

This is why I was browsing it for this, because I was thinking about it, I wonder what interesting stuff there is about the John Hancock.

Oh, yeah.

The signature.

You know, by word for a signature, because he was the first person to sign it.

And there's not much, but I hadn't really looked at the signatures there before.

And it's really like, you know, if you sign someone's birthday card at work and someone writes their own name incredibly big.

So this is like, did you not know the rest of us were going to have to sign this?

It's way more than twice the size of the second biggest.

John Adams has just written, get well soon.

Yeah.

See you later.

We'll just lovely working with you.

There's on just sports signatures.

Yeah.

There's Luka Doncic, who's a basketball player.

Genius.

He's a big deal.

He's a genius.

Mavericks.

And his signature has been making the news lately because it broke a record for the most ever paid for a basketball card at public auction.

So

get these specific cards called Logoman cards or logoman cards.

It's a a thing in the basketball world where you have your NBA logo on this card from your journey.

It feels like it'll be logoman then.

It does.

And yeah, some people say logo.

So you got your NBA logo

or your NBA logo.

Yeah.

It just depends where you come from, doesn't it?

Anyway,

are you going to ask us to guess?

Yes, okay, fine.

Well, that wasn't going to be part of it, but sure.

So that sold at most ever-paid public auction for a basketball card.

How much do you think for November 22?

It's cost $75.

Yeah.

Well, Steve Jobs, half a mil.

Button Gwinnett, over one million.

I'm going to say it would be somewhere in between the two.

I'll go for $700,000.

Oh, I like that you've done that.

You've undershot it, and it's very generous of you.

So it went for $3.12 million and actually sold in private the year before for $4.6 million, which doesn't imply the person who bought.

In a year as well,

What makes you think you've got this card that you paid $4 million for, and a year later you're like, you know what, I'm going to sell it for $3 million.

What goes through your head?

They must have come upon really hard times selling it.

I think what it was is it was initially bought by Vince Kasuga and then he sold it, but then flooded the market with all his other Luca signatures.

Chicago.

The orphans of Chicago were seeing so many of these bloody basketball cards.

Anyway, that's the thing I really like about this, which makes me want to laugh in the face of whoever bought it, is that his signature keeps changing and it's changed a lot since his teens and there's a lot of chat that actually it's not his signature.

He's got his hand.

He's having replaced.

Is that it?

You're so close.

Oh, um the basketball has crippled his fingers over the years and it's changed the way he writes his name.

Someone's just fodged it.

That's the claim.

He's died and been replaced by another.

Someone's just fodged it.

Okay, I think Jake James has just said that.

No, no, no.

Keep going at it.

Keep going at it.

People think he's got the Luca signature, which is his old one, and the Lula one, which is his new one, because it's more feminine.

Since he became president of Brazil.

It looks like he's been replaced by the president.

That's the conspiracy theory.

Wow, I love it.

And as Dan says, he's a genius, so I think he's going to do a pretty good job.

Sorry, it's actually called the Lulu one.

Since he was replaced by the AC signature.

There's been a body swap comedy somewhere.

And anyway, it's thought that it's his mother's signature.

Oh,

interesting.

Someone else did that.

And in fact, we were talking about presidential signatures, Ronald Reagan.

Yeah, but when he was an actor, not when he was president, he got his mum.

I think

he paid his mum or he asked the studio to pay for his mum to sign all of his fan mail.

And it's now believed that pretty much everything he wrote from the late 1930s to the late 1950s is suspect.

You can't trust any signature from that time.

It's not authentic.

Even his Christmas card was private.

Him getting his mum to do it all.

You know, the whole Berlin Wall thing and everything.

That was actually his mum.

All his mum.

I'm so glad you clarified it.

I thought what you meant, Anna, was not that his mum had written the fake signature, but that he'd changed his signature to his mum's signature.

Well, that's because when he was at school, they sent a letter back saying that he couldn't do his homework.

He used to practice his homework.

You knew it inside out, yeah.

I'm in the category of autograph collector to a certain degree.

Yeah, I'd like the occasional.

Yeah, if I could find one.

And I brought in a few of my favourite from my collection just to show you.

So, first off.

You guys can't see what I can.

I can see Jidan's back from where I'm sitting, and I I know the story behind this.

So the first thing I have is a signed Beatles drumstick from the drummer of the Beatles.

Okay.

Yeah, Pete Best, who was the original.

Oh, you've got Pete Best.

That's so cool.

Yeah, so I don't remember buying this.

I woke up one day and in the post came it and it turns out I was drunk in a car and on the way home I bought a copy.

I have to stop doing that.

We're just driving home.

Don't drink and drive and eBay.

So that's the first thing.

So drummers love to sign a stick.

I like when signatures are appropriate to an item.

This I found in a second-hand bookshop.

And I know I've shown you guys this before, but for the listener, what it is, is a signed Stephen Hawking book.

Now, how would Stephen Hawking do his signature?

Kiss, I was thinking, like put lipstick on him and kiss the...

It's kind of close.

It's not too far away.

What they used to do was, is his assistant would dip his thumb into some ink.

So I have the thumbprint of of Stephen Hawking.

And it says thumbprint of Stephen Hawking witnessed by Susan Maisie, who must have been his assistant or nurse at the time.

It says, I never give my thumbprint out, and I will not be doing so on this occasion.

So that's quite cool.

I found that for five quid in a second-hand bookshop.

Here's the last one, which is interesting.

This is a baseball.

Oh, yeah.

Baseball signed by a Hall of Famer called Gaylord Perry.

Yeah, who is someone I'm fascinated with, but we won't go into it now.

But what's interesting about this is you can get baseballs that are worth more if they're signed in certain ways.

So this is worth more than most baseballs would be if he'd signed it differently.

So can you guess why this is worth more?

Signed by Gaylord Perry?

Is it his name wrong?

No, no, correct spelling.

So he signed it, there are two seams, or rather there's one seam, isn't there, that goes all the way around.

And he signed it in the nice bow beautifully between the point where the two seams are closer to each other.

So that's the first thing.

That's That's absolutely right.

So this is what's known as the sweet spot of a baseball.

You can get a long signature right across without having to break it up.

Nothing gets in the way.

The other thing is that it's a official ball American League, which is not the

NLB, right?

So this would be worth less because it's an official Major League Baseball.

So that shoots it down.

It has his details.

Hall of Famer, 91 on it.

So if anyone's a world champion, a World Series champion or whatever, if they add the detail, that's going to make it more.

And then, the last thing.

If you put your name, address, phone number,

Twitter handles,

it gets better and better.

So, there's one more thing, it's specifically to do with the signature that makes this worth more than a different baseball signature.

Is it because it's blue?

Absolutely, it's blue ink.

Blue ink.

It looks nicer with the red seam.

It will also stay on longer than black.

Black will rub off, according to the experts who auction baseballs off.

I have a signed American football by Colin Kaepernick.

Oh, yeah.

Which I got when he was an American footballer, and now he's a civil rights guy, right?

Right.

But it's signed in like silver writing, and to be honest, I'm not sure it'll last for another, you know, 10 years.

I think it'll all rub off.

Yeah.

Still, it's so nice to get a signature where you can say, I got it when he was American football and now he's a civil rights guy, rather than now he's a paedophile, or now he's in prison for massive tax fraud.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland.

Andy.

At Andrew Humphrey.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website, no such thingasofish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Also, check out the portal to Club Fish, our secret little behind-the-scenes land, where we add bonus content.

content all the time and have lots of fans chatting to to each other.

It's a great place.

Check it out.

Otherwise, come back next week.

We'll be back with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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